Recently, as personal computers (PCs) have become remarkably popularized in offices, networking techniques for connecting them have advanced. Conventionally, upon use, printers are connected to PCs in a one-to-one correspondence. As is often the case recently, a printer is connected to a network to allow PCs connected to the network to share the printer.
Under the circumstances, a print system exists, which receives print data written in the printer language created by a printer driver from the spooler of the OS of a PC, and a print job including this print data is spooled again, thereby providing a print job control function more advanced than the function provided by the OS. A known example of the print job control functions is the job grouping function of grouping a plurality of print job by numbering them, and transmitting the grouped jobs to the printer in the set order.
In using the job grouping function in such a print system, print data corresponding to the grouped print jobs are to be transmitted to the printer in the set order.
When a print server is installed in a network, the print server receives a print job from a PC client connected to the network and causes a printer it manages to print, which is directly connected to the network. For this reason, while receiving a print job grouped by the job grouping function from a print application, the print server may receive a print job from another PC client. In this case, print jobs for group printing may be mixed with other print jobs.
In transmitting a plurality of print jobs for group printing from a PC client to the print server, therefore, demands have arisen for a print system having the function of grouping the print jobs into one print job using a job start instruction at the start and a job end instruction at the end.
As a method of realizing this requirement, the following may be used. When the job grouping function is designated by a PC client, print jobs to be grouped are received from the spooler of the OS of the PC client. These print jobs are then spooled again, and the printer driver groups them into one print job. With this operation, a plurality of print jobs can be grouped into one print job. This makes it possible to make a network printer print the grouped print data without any interruption by another print job.
In using the job grouping function in such a print system, a print application inputs print jobs to be grouped to the spooler of the OS upon instructing the print system having the job grouping function to start grouping. When all the necessary print jobs are input to the spooler, the application instructs the print system to end the grouping operation. Upon reception of a grouping start instruction from the print application, the print system executes grouping of the print jobs extracted from the spooler of the OS into one print job until the reception of a grouping end instruction by using a printer driver.
In this method, however, since there is a difference between the timing at which the print system receives a grouping start/end instruction from an application and the timing at which print data is extracted from the spooler, the print jobs output as jobs to be grouped from the print application may not coincide with the print jobs to be grouped by the print system.